it started with a curious coincidence. in 2018, german car manufacturers, taken aback by the advents of google and tesla, invested a lot of money in research on autonomous vehicles. they gathered an immense amount of images from car sensors that they then needed to process. in that same year, venezuela was hit by a terrible economic crisis making thousands of workers unemployed. a lot of them turned to online micro-working platforms, where they joined people from kenya and the philippines, and ended up annotating images that were coming by the thousands from germany and the us.

unknown label explores the daily reality of online micro-workers from the global south who annotate images for self-driving cars. it investigates the power asymmetries and neocolonialist exploitation involved in the human labour necessary to train ai systems. unknown label reveals the hidden people that help shape how machines see the world.

nicolas gourault is an artist and filmmaker based in paris (fr) with a background in visual arts and visual studies. he has worked with forensic architecture before graduating from le fresnoy, studio national des arts. his work is imbued with this double training, navigating between online open-source investigations and the critical use of new media as documentary tools. his films and video installations explore the power relationships embedded in technologies and tries to build counter-narratives through the use of situated testimony and experimental image-making.

his artworks have been exhibited in contemporary art venues such as centre pompidou (fr), the zkm | zentrum für kunst und medien (de), hartware medienkunstverein (hmkv) (de), ars electronica (at)and in film festivals such as cinÉma du rÉel (fr), hot docs (ca), sheffield doc|fest (uk), festival nouveaux cinÉma (ca), indielisboa (pt).